Coal lives Body, work and memory among Italian miners in Wallonia, Belgium

This chapter explores the link between environmental history and migration studies by analyzing the case of Italian miners in Wallonia after World War II. Employing an Environmental Humanities approach, the chapter utilizes novels and poems to analyze the ecological shift operated by the capitalistic organization of coal extraction and how this affected the socio-environmental structure of the Walloon landscape and its relationship with the people who inhabited it. The chapter demonstrates how workers' bodies are a key element of the interaction between nature and society, constituting a vantage point to access subaltern ecologies. It illustrates the transcorporeal landscape and the human ecology of Italian miners, showing the many physical interchanges between their bodies--conceived as permeable sites merged and transformed by the social and economical powers they were subjugated by--and the techno-capitalistic metabolism of coal that shaped their everyday life and the very space they inhabited.